On Monday night, at the second of three debates in the Massachusetts Senate primary, Seth Moulton used his turn to question Ed Markey directly. He told Markey his name appears repeatedly in the newly released Epstein files. Then he asked why he would take a meeting with a lobbyist on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein.
Markey said he had never met Epstein and didn’t know him. He said he’d been calling for an investigation from the beginning. He called the question character assassination.
Moderator Adam Reilly asked Moulton what evidence he had. He didn’t produce any on stage. When GBH News went back to the campaign afterward with the same question, Moulton adviser Doug Rubin pointed to a single email in the Justice Department’s Epstein release.
I’ve been covering these files for a long time. There is a long list of people in them who deserve far more scrutiny than they’ve gotten. So I went and pulled the email.
It’s Bates-stamped EFTA00838871. Here is what’s in it.
The document
The email isn’t from Bob Crowe, the Nelson Mullins partner whose name is attached to this story. It’s from Vinoda Basnayake, Of Counsel and Chair of DC Government Relations at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough. He sent it on December 14, 2015 to Cheikh Tidiane Sy, an intermediary for Karim Wade. Crowe is copied.
The subject line is “Proposal from Nelson Mullins.”
Basnayake opens by asking about money. The firm wanted $50,000 per month for three months of work, $150,000 total, paid quarterly in advance. A man named Diagne agreed to it and asked that fifty thousand be deferred until November 30. Basnayake writes that he’s tried to reach Diagne several times about the payment and hasn’t been able to.
Then comes the paragraph everybody is fighting about:
Bob Crowe, the Chair of Government Relations at Nelson Mullins, who I have copied, has already been in contact with the State Department on this matter and had a very detailed discussion with a high ranking official working closely on this. We are engaging Congress and had an initial briefing with Senator Ed Markey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Africa.
And then, in the very next line, straight back to the money. The agreement was a hundred and fifty thousand on or before November 30. The firm started work out of good faith. The fifty thousand remains outstanding. Can you please speak to Mr. Diagne and have this arranged.
That’s the shape of it. The Markey sentence sits between two demands for payment, inside a paragraph whose entire job is to show a client what he’s already getting for a fee he hasn’t finished paying. It’s listed alongside contacting the State Department and having a very detailed discussion with a high ranking official, neither of whom is named either.
The sentence carries no date. It names nobody at Markey’s office. It doesn’t say whether the briefing was a meeting, a phone call, or an email, or whether it was with the senator or with staff. PolitiFact asked Nelson Mullins to fill in the blanks and the firm didn’t respond.
And Bob Crowe, the person that sentence is about, is copied on the whole thing and doesn’t write a word. The next day he forwards the thread to Epstein with one line.
FYI.
What the rest of the thread shows
The forward carries the earlier correspondence, and it’s all money and logistics. In October, Sy confirms from Dakar that Wade’s people want to go ahead and asks for a written contract and an invoice for a one month provision. Basnayake writes that the firm was contacted by one of Wade’s business associates in the U.S. who happens to be old friends with Crowe, and that Crowe sent the contract and wire details to Wade’s associate in New York.
Nobody in the chain mentions Epstein. The Miami Herald reported in April that Epstein paid at least five hundred thousand dollars to a Senegalese lawyer representing Wade, and another hundred thousand to Nelson Mullins. Markey’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in that story.
There’s one more email, from June 2016, shortly before Wade walked out of prison on a presidential pardon. Crowe writes to Epstein that he was told by the congressional delegation that they put pressure on Senegal’s President Macky Sall and that Wade would be released. It names nobody who was in that delegation and says nothing about what the pressure was.
What Markey’s office says
Markey went on GBH’s Boston Public Radio two days after the debate. He said there was no meeting on the subject Moulton is charging him with. He called the accusation absolutely inaccurate, called it desperate, and called it an attempt to engage in the politics of smear.
His campaign told GBH it went back through the senator’s and his staff’s calendars from that period and found no such meeting. Spokesperson Jonathan Ng told PolitiFact that neither Markey nor his staff were briefed by any lobbyist or had any meetings related to Epstein and the Wade case. When GBH asked him to produce calendars or emails, Ng answered that they don’t have calendars for meetings that never happened.
What the claim turned into
On stage on August 3, the question was why would you take a meeting with a lobbyist on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein. That phrasing tells an audience the senator knew whose errand he was running.
Two days later Moulton’s campaign posted an Instagram slideshow. The opening slide reads “Senator Ed Markey’s Role in the Epstein Files,” over a line saying the DOJ files reveal Markey was part of the Epstein lobbying effort, next to a graphic of Markey and Epstein.
When PolitiFact asked the campaign for evidence that Markey knew Epstein was involved in Wade’s case, spokesperson Taylor Hebble wrote back: “Nowhere in our post do we claim that Markey knew that Epstein was involved in Wade’s case.”
So what’s left of it is a lobbyist telling a client, in a letter chasing an unpaid balance, that his firm had gotten in front of a Senate office about a corruption case in Senegal. Under a graphic titled “Senator Ed Markey’s Role in the Epstein Files.”
That slideshow carries the logos of PolitiFact, Al Jazeera and the Miami Herald along the bottom. None of those newsrooms made the claim Moulton was making. Al Jazeera’s 2016 piece on Wade’s release contains neither Epstein nor Markey. The Herald piece doesn’t mention Markey. GBH’s own reporters wrote that nothing in Moulton’s timeline suggests Markey interacted with Epstein at all, or knew Epstein was behind the lobbyist. PolitiFact rated the post Mostly False.
Seth Moulton knows exactly what Epstein’s name does to any name printed beside it. He put it there anyway, and when a fact-checker asked him what he had, his campaign wrote back that they weren’t claiming it.
This isn’t the first time
There’s already a version of this on his own record. In September of last year Moulton said he could not recuse himself from votes touching Divergent Technologies, a defense manufacturer he’s invested in, because voting was his constitutional duty. WBUR reported in June that he holds stakes worth at least a million dollars in defense-linked startups with business before his own Armed Services Committee. After that reporting, and after he launched this Senate run, his campaign said he would recuse from exactly those votes and move the assets into a blind trust.
Meanwhile, Markey introduced the Qualified Immunity Abolition Act with Ayanna Pressley after ICE agents killed Renee Good, which would let people sue federal officers and strip the qualified immunity defense in those cases. He’s the lead sponsor of the Transgender Bill of Rights. He voted against funding DHS and said we should defund and abolish ICE before almost anyone else in the Senate would say it.
Early voting in Massachusetts starts August 22. The primary is September 1. There’s one more debate.
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Source: EFTA00838871, Department of Justice Epstein files.
